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THIS ARTICLE FIRST APPEARED IN APRIL 2006. EXPANDED & UPDATED: OCTOBER 2010. |
It has stood as silent and as old as the Sphinx lo these several millennia, mocking us with its riddles, defying us with its unfathomable logic, captivating us with its fearful symmetry. Scattered ruins in a circular cluster draw upwards of 1 million pilgrims annually to a triangle of land wedged between two rural roads on the Salisbury Plain of Wiltshire, England. We don’t know why it was built or who built it. If Stonehenge was built to bring people together to wonder in metaphysical awe at the magical mysteries of Nature, God, and Man, it triumphs still.
Many things we know conclusively
about Stonehenge:
• WHEN STONEHENGE WAS BUILT. It was built and altered in
several stages over a period of 1500
years between 3000BC and 1500BC. When the Romans arrived in Britain 200 years ago, the
newest parts of Stonehenge were already 1500 years old and the monument was a partial
ruin.
• HOW STONEHENGE WAS BUILT. Archeological evidence indicates that Stonehenge was originally
an earthwork circle that evolved into a more complex structure, first with wooden posts
and later with huge stones set in phases over hundreds of years.
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• WHERE THE STONES CAME FROM. The original 80 monolithic bluestones weighing several tons each were brought with great difficulty over land, sea, and inland via rivers and portage from 240 miles away in the Preseli Hills of southwestern Wales. Later in the Bronze Age even larger sarsen stones of 25+ tons were dragged in from northern Wiltshire almost 20 miles from Stonehenge. Modern experiments have shown how prehistoric people could move and erect such large stones with precision using only simple tolls and no wheels. |
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• STONEHENGE DOES NOT STAND ALONE. It stands in a broad local landscape loaded with dozens of other prehistoric monuments: earthworks, circles, burial chambers, mounds and barrows, each significant, each mysterious, each somehow related to all the rest. Together with a second major prehistoric landscape at nearby Avebury, Stonehenge has been a listed UNESCO’s World Heritage Site since 1986.
Two great mysteries remain: Who built Stonehenge? and Why was Stonehenge built? Over the last 2000 years many scholars (and at least as many crackpots) have offered up theories that attempt to solve the mysteries. Here’s a sampling:
• Ancient Welsh texts credit Merlin the Magician with the magical transporting of the bluestones — thought to have magical healing powers — to Stonehenge to form a symbolic Round Table for a Wiltshire Camelot.
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• Great English 17th century architect Inigo Jones could not believe that such a sophisticated structural array as Stonehenge could be designed and built by primitives. He posited the idea that the Romans built Stonehenge—and drew up complex plans of how a Roman temple would have looked at Stonehenge. |
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• John Aubrey, who first discovered and analyzed the ring of "post holes" at Stonehenge that bear his name ("Aubrey Holes") was the first modern to suggest that Druids were responsible for building Stonehenge as a temple for their Celtic religion. Aubrey had read of Roman accounts of the Druid priesthood from the time of Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain in 55BC. What Aubrey didn’t know, however, was that Stonehenge was already 1500 to 3000 years old at the time of Julius Caesar, and already in partial ruins. The people who populated |
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Britain long before the Celts arrived
with their Druid |
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• Recent archeological scholarship suggests that the "Beaker People" of the New Stone Age began the earliest construction of Stonehenge sometime around 3000BC. Pottery and tool artifacts unearthed at Stonehenge support the idea that these primitives were on the site and were the likely builders. The design of the henge (an earthen ditch and bank circle) with a northeastern orientation in line with the exact point of the rising sun on the summer solstice suggests that Stonehenge was more than a simple temple or burial ground for important priests or Celtic kings, queens, and nobles. Indeed, as has been suggested in other ancient sites in Egypt, Mexico, and Peru, Stonehenge may have been designed on an intricate mathematical plan as an astrological calendar that could accurately predict the seasons, the phases of the moon, and even ellipses.
MODERN DRUIDS AND STONEHENGE
Of all the proposals tendered one has best
caught the public imagination. Not long after John Aubrey first suggested that Druids were
the likely founders of Stonehenge, Druid societies began popping up in Britain, the USA,
and Australia. So popular were these semi-secret organizations in their Ku Klux Klan like
white robes and hoods that their annual ceremonies on "mid-summer" have drawn
great crowds to Stonehenge at dawn on the morning of the summer solstice for well over 100
years. Among the members of the Ancient Order of Druids
— one of the more mystical
groups dating from the Victorian era —
was none other than Winston Churchill, who
joined while a young man at Oxford.
Modern Druids popularized Stonehenge as a
tourist destination. Much damage was caused to the monument by the throngs who swarmed
over its stones, until —
in 1984 — Stonehenge became the charge of
English Heritage, England’s public/private agency set up by Parliament to oversee and care
for the country’s most important historic and prehistoric sites.
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STONEHENGE TODAY |
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hucksters hawking ice lollies, souvenirs, and what |
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passes in England for hamburgers. |
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close to the stones as possible, straining to hear |
| the droning of the tour guides attempting to
de-mystify one of the world’s great mysteries. It’s the fifth impression of Stonehenge that’s satisfying. Back away from the stone circle 30 or more yards into the grassy field, enough to minimize the human presence, enough to put the circle into its natural presence caught between the England’s solid green earth and the drama of its John Constable sky. Spellbinding. |
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